Everything You Need To Know About Facebook Pixel And Events

Facebook Pixel is one of the most important digital tracking tools out there. A part of Facebook’s Business Suite, it is a powerful code that tracks all traffic and activity on your website so you can manage your ad funnel, website actions, and CTAs accordingly. The code allows you to analyze the performance of your web tools by allowing you to measure the effectiveness of the way your website is set up and what actions people are taking on it.

The Pixel can be used to:

• Track website data: The Facebook Pixel code is installed on your website and fires every time someone takes an action on it. Whether it’s a page view or a purchase, the Pixel can track and provide you its information so you can create a web-based funnel to drive better results for your brand.

• Measure the effectiveness of your ads: The Pixel code enables Facebook tracking on your website so you can see whether people are taking any action before they exit your website. This can help you understand whether your ads are performing well, or if you’re targeting the right audience in your ads.

• Improve your marketing performance: When you’re tracking web data and ad effectiveness, it can automatically help you improve your marketing performance as you are constantly up to date with leads, traffic, and other data.

  Learn all there is to know about this tool and its importance for your business, and how you can manage it in this blog.

  • Is the Facebook Pixel important for you?
  • How to create a Facebook Pixel?
  • Managing the Facebook Pixel with the appropriate tools.
  • Event Tracking and Type of Events.

Is the Facebook Pixel important for you?

Yes! Imagine this: you have three store branches across the city and each of them receives 100 visitors per week whom you track with the help of certain tools operated by your employees. But that’s an active store where people can see who’s coming in at what time. However, you cannot do that on your website without automated tracking tools, one of which is the Pixel.

You as a business owner need to know how many people are visiting your site and what actions they’re taking there without going through a lengthy process of tracking these events through backend dashboards or lengthy sheets. This is why Facebook Pixel is important for you. It won’t only help you understand that activity, but also create treemaps and funnels to determine what process is working for you, and which one is not.

How to create a Facebook Pixel?

The Facebook Event Manager tool is the hub where you can manage and track all your Pixel events and data. To create a Pixel for your business account, visit Facebook’s Event Manager from your Business Manager suite and click on “Connect a data source” to begin. The data source is the platform from where you want to track customer actions and collect their data.

On clicking this button, you’ll get the following dialogue box where you’ll be prompted to select a source where your tracking will be installed. This can be your website, your app, or your offline store from where you’re collecting customer data.

To get your Pixel code, you’ll need to select the “Website” option as that’s where it’s installed. If your primary tracking platform is your app, you’ll need the SDK code which is the app alternative of the Pixel. Or if you’re collecting offline information from your store, you’ll need to select the “Offline” option to connect your ERP where customer data is being entered.

Once you select the website option, you’ll be presented with two more options for Conversion API and Pixel. The Conversion API will redirect you to set up custom codes to track conversions directly from your web server. However, the Facebook Pixel is a better option if you want to set up tracking on a basic level.

The next step will direct you to add details about the Pixel itself. What you want to name it, and which website will it be installed on?

Once you add these, you’ll be directed toward the setup phase where you can set up the Pixel through WooCommerce, Google Tag Manager, or other integration tools of your choice.

Managing the Facebook Pixel

Managing the Facebook Pixel is easy, but you need to know the right tools that can help you. Fortunately, Facebook has made it very easy to track, test, and change the Pixel set up. Of course, the usage of these tools depends on your technical know-how and access limits. But even on a basic level, these tools can help you understand how the Pixel works, and if there are any problems you need to fix.

Facebook Event Manager

The Event Manager does everything: from setting up the code to testing Facebook Pixel integration with websites, and more. So basically it’s the hub without which managing the Pixel won’t be possible.

The Event Managers shows you an overview of the Pixel where your tracked events are listed. Then there’s the test events tab where you can test active or inactive Pixels on your website. The Diagnostics section helps you review any errors or warnings that the Pixel is receiving, the History tab shows previous activity from your data sources, and the settings section helps you manage everything else.

Pixel Helper Extension

The Pixel Helper is a troubleshooting tool that’s added as an extension in your browser, and that helps you track whether the website has a Pixel installed, what event it’s tracking, and whether or not it’s working.

When a website has a Pixel installed, the Pixel Helper icon turns blue, and a badge appears showing the number of pixels on the page. If the icon remains grey, the website doesn’t have any Pixels installed. Upon clicking the icon, you can check details of the Pixel, its id, and other troubleshooting details.

Facebook for WooCommerce Plugin

One of the most important benefits of the Pixel is that it helps you streamline and automate your online shop on Instagram and Facebook. One of the tools that help you do that is the Facebook for WooCommerce plugin that allows you to integrate your online store with the respective shop sections on FB and IG. This means that the inventory, price, details, and every detail of each product will be updated on these apps automatically with the help of this plugin.

Here are all the ways Facebook for WooCommerce can help you with your eCommerce brand:

• It syncs your products to a FB or IG store that helps drive traffic to your website from your page or Instagram profile.
• Helps set up dynamic ads that can help retarget people who visit your website, add products to cart, or even add products to their wishlist; basically run ads based on their browsing behavior.
• You can also buy FB ads directly from WooCommerce with the help of this plugin.
• The plugin also helps you set up proper CTAs including Messages and more so you can create customer touchpoints across your digital platforms.

The Facebook Pixel plays a key role in setting this plugin and thus makes it important for eCommerce stores to install it on their website.

Facebook Analytics

Facebook Analytics is a one-stop tool that shows you every analytical data there is to know about your page, website, and everything else that’s connected to your Facebook Business platform. It tracks the channels that matter most to your business and tells you everything there is to know about the traffic being driven to these channels.

But to understand that traffic and track their start till endpoints, you need to have the Pixel integrated with your ad account, Facebook page, website, and even the SDK on your app if you have one. You can even track funnels and acquisition rates in terms of days, weeks, or months. So where Google Analytics tracks your website and its data, Facebook analytics helps you track your page and all the other sources that are connected to it.

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is a measurement and marketing tool that allows you to consolidate and manage all of your tracking and analytics codes on your website without modifying its code. Basically, Google Tag manager acts as the central hub which combines all your data codes, stores them in one place, and generates a code that then tracks data on behalf of all these sources. That way, if you have multiple codes to add to your website, you won’t have to install each of them separately. Rather, you can set up a Google Tag Manager code that includes tracking information of all your sources.

Confused? The following diagram can help you understand GTag better:

Say you have multiple codes to install on the website including Google Analytics, AdWords, Facebook Pixel, AdRoll, and more. All these sum up to include 5 or more development tasks that increase your work, and the load on the website in terms of speed and performance. Google Tag Manager eliminates that by consolidating all codes into one which will then be added to your website.

How are Facebook Pixel and Google Tag Manager related?

We’ve already established that the Pixel is an important code to install on your website. However, you may have multiple Pixels to install, or you have multiple codes to install along with the Pixel. In such cases, Google Tag Manager can organize and consolidate your efforts easily.

Event Tracking with the Pixel

If we haven’t mentioned it before, let’s do it again: the Pixel can help you track multiple events across your website. What are events? Actions that people take when they visit your site and can include Page Views, Add to Cart, Registration, Lead, Conversions, Purchase, and more. Events can be divided into three types based on tracking:

A- Standard events:

These are predefined triggers that include common metrics that advertisers usually track. They’re readily available to set up, and can be done manually or through the Event Setup tool. There are up to 17 standard events that can be installed on your website including Add payment info, view content, add to cart, add to wishlist, complete registration, contact, customize product, donate, find location, initiate checkout, lead, purchase, schedule, search, start trial, submit application, and subscribe. Each of these can be installed on the website with a simple code that can be extracted from the Event Manager tool.

So to sum it up, Standard Events are events or actions Facebook has created by default and offers easy setup through its tools.

B- Custom conversions

Even though Facebook Pixel covers almost all the tracking mechanisms you need a record of, sometimes businesses need more information or conditional tracking.

For example, you have a shoe brand where you offer different shoe types, including sports, formal, casual, and such. Now when you run ads, you want to target people based on their interest in each category. Custom conversions can help you do that by letting you create URL based rules for each category and track those custom conversions in your ads, where you can create customer segments like you see on Our site with Custom, Lookalike, or Saved audiences.

So to sum it up, custom conversions help you define customized conversion criteria through which you can personalize your ads further.

C- Custom events

Facebook custom events offer the next level of customization for businesses. They don’t offer conversion tracking, rather, they track events that aren’t available in Facebook’s standard set, and thus, need to be customized by the business itself.

For example, you have a blog where you want to track if people read at least 50% of your blog. Now Facebook’s standard Page View event will automatically trigger as soon as someone visits the page but you also want to track at least 50% of scrolling on the website. In that case, you’ll create a custom event that can track that.

It is recommended that when you create custom events, always make sure that the event isn’t part of Facebook’s standard event set. If a custom event replaces a standard event, it may impact tracking and results from Facebook’s end.

Summing it up…

Digital marketing has evolved, and now there are solutions available to advertisers that weren’t even a few years back. The Facebook Pixel tool is one of them. And considering how important Facebook is in the digital marketing landscape, the tool’s importance increases tenfold. Knowing this, and the kind of convenience the Pixel provides to advertisers, it gets even more crucial to learn how it works so you can utilize it to the max.

This blog series has discussed not only that but also how Facebook Pixel is created, the tools that help you manage it better, Facebook events and their types, and the importance of custom conversions and how they’re set up. We hope these blogs have helped you understand the Pixel better. Let us know what you’d like to learn about next in the comments.